


Varieties of Disturbance

by greenpen



Series: Cathedrals [2]
Category: Homeland
Genre: Gen, Self-insertion, meta wish fulfillment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:02:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26771863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenpen/pseuds/greenpen
Summary: In person, she looks exactly like the black and white portrait on the cover of her book. She is conventionally beautiful, her blonde hair flowing just past her shoulders and blue-green eyes widening as I question her. On multiple occasions when I meet her she wears little to no makeup and dresses casually, like any other person walking down the street. But she is far from any other person walking down the street. She knows it, and after my first interview with her at the café, I know it too. As I look at her across the table, in the flesh, I have the same arresting feeling as when I first eyed her image on the book cover in my flat in London: something was haunting this woman.
Series: Cathedrals [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951657
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	Varieties of Disturbance

In late 2011 Carrie Mathison sat in her mentor Saul Berenson’s office at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They were hot on the trail of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell planning an imminent attack in America. Earlier that day, the FBI had revealed that Tom Walker, a presumed dead American Marine captured in Iraq in 2003, was actually alive, on American soil, and a part of that cell, plotting an attack on his own country. 

“We had gone public with very major, very scary news,” Mathison tells me. “Tips were pouring in by the hundreds. I should have been focusing on that. Ordinarily I probably would have been. Outside, it was a frenzy. In his office together, we were the exact opposite, very quiet. I looked at him and said, ‘I had an epiphany today: I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, won’t I?’ I phrased it as a question, but it wasn’t a question. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, ‘No, you won’t. You’ll find someone. You’ll have someone.’ He was my closest friend, I believe he thought of me as his own daughter. We just looked at each other. We both knew the answer was yes.” 

What had prompted the epiphany, as she calls it? Mathison hesitates, wondering how much to reveal. “I… I had just fallen in love. I didn’t know it then or couldn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. I loved someone, and I had made a terrible mistake, what felt like a betrayal, that had ruined that, because of my job. I put the job and the work ahead of those feelings, because that was my instinct, my compulsion. And it poisoned it. I’d never felt this way about someone before. The sting of that was alarming. I didn’t expect it. The way that ended, I felt like, that’s the way this will always end. I’ll never be able to make the work secondary. And I was right, sort of.” 

It’s a scene Mathison returned to often while writing her book, _Tyranny of Secrets_ , about her life in the CIA. Part memoir, part exposé, the book charts her rise in the ranks of the CIA and the eventual fallout of her decision, in 2018, to reveal the identity of an American spy to the Russian government in exchange for key evidence that she claims prevented full-scale war between America and Pakistan. Since its publication last summer, the book has taken the world by storm and has sparked a litany of legal action and political mudslinging debating its content and veracity. 

She doesn’t describe the events of that realization in the book specifically, but she says it informed how she thought about telling her story. In the book’s prologue, she writes:

> _This book has offered me a final, gleaming truth, which is that my life was far from predetermined and what I thought was my fate was not so._

I wonder aloud if this final, gleaming truth is a reference to her earlier epiphany. “Absolutely,” she says. “I had it ingrained in me that I couldn’t have that, that I couldn’t be _not_ alone. Saul was my mentor for twenty years. I think of him as my sherpa, leading me up the mountain. He was doing it alone. At first, I assumed that’s how it had to be done. Later, I felt resigned that it was the only way it _could_ be. You tell yourself that you make these sacrifices, these allowances, because the work requires it. It’s a really lonely business. You can’t share your life with partners or family for obvious reasons. But I loved the work, and I felt it was my destiny—I don’t use that word lightly—so the sacrifice felt worth it. It wasn’t until after I was out, until I was here, that I realized it was a lie. A lie that they told me, and then that I told myself, and I repeated it so much that eventually it just became background noise.” 

The “work” Mathison mentions brought her to far reaches of the world: Berlin, Beirut, Kabul, Baghdad, Islamabad, Amsterdam, Moscow. By her telling, she’s been involved in some way or another in just about every major American intelligence event of the last twenty years. Some of these events we already knew about; others were heavily classified and she decided to reveal anyway (hence the aforementioned legal action). 

Just as surprising as new details about the machinations of the American intelligence sector, and part of what’s made her debut so successful, is how easily Mathison enmeshes her personal demons (she is extremely forthright about her struggles with mental illness and motherhood) with events in the intelligence landscape at the time. Her own trajectory feels like an eerie analogy of modern America and especially post-9/11 America. 

“I came of age physically in the 80s and 90s, a relatively peaceful time in the US. But I feel like I came of age psychologically in the early 2000s, at the beginning of my career and just after 9/11,” Mathison, now 41, says. “My enemies weren’t actually my enemies, my friends weren’t really my friends. I inherited and internalized so much without even realizing it. I was hysterical, but I was gaslighted. I was aggressive, but I was extremely fragile. That’s America since 2001. The similarities are not lost on me now.” 

I arrive in Moscow from London for my first interview with Mathison in late spring, one month before the book's release. She’s suggested a small café in a quieter residential neighborhood. Mathison has lived in Moscow for the last two years. Following the intelligence exchange with Russia in 2018 she applied for political asylum. She currently has a long-stay residency here.

I am atypically late for our interview but she immediately spots me when I walk through the door. Perhaps my unease as a foreigner is evident, or maybe she’s done her research beforehand and knows exactly what I look like, the names of my parents, and every address I’ve ever lived at. She is a spy after all. I make such a comment offhand, to break the ice, but she rejects my comparison. “I was never a spy. I was a case officer. The person who _recruits_ the spy.” 

I counter that it’s a distinction without a difference. I’ve read an advance copy of her book, so at this point I feel like I basically know her life story, including all the things she’s done that culturally we’d attribute to a spy: ingratiated herself to powerful figures to gain insider knowledge, made herself invisible to avoid detection or suspicion, and maneuvered incredible coups to ward off terrorist attacks or political calamity. I leave out the part about her defecting to Russia at the very end. 

I expect she might brush me off given my lack of expertise in the field she’s devoted her entire adult life to but she only nods her head and says quietly, “That’s interesting.” 

Mathison is a careful listener, absorbing my questions and then pausing for just a brief moment before she answers. She possesses a remarkable ability to speak both eloquently and succinctly on a variety of topics. Some of this I chalk up to her having just written a book about herself, akin to learning a new word and then finding it applicable in many ways in daily life. Still, she seems to have an answer—and a good one—for nearly every question I ask her. Then I remember she used to lie for a living, and while I believe she’s (probably) not lying to me, I know the daily practice of thinking on her toes, being able to string words into sentences into paragraphs until the other person forgets just what they were asking, has served her well here. Maybe she missed a second career as a press secretary. 

In person, she looks exactly like the black and white portrait on the cover of her book. She is conventionally beautiful, her blonde hair flowing just past her shoulders and blue-green eyes widening as I question her. On multiple occasions when I meet her she wears little to no makeup and dresses casually, like any other person walking down the street. But she is far from any other person walking down the street. She knows it, and after my first interview with her at the café, I know it too. As I look at her across the table, in the flesh, I have the same arresting feeling as when I first eyed her image on the book cover in my flat in London: something was haunting this woman. 

. . . . 

One of the first things I learn while writing this story is that there aren’t a lot of people who will talk to me about Carrie Mathison. My attempts at fact-checking our interviews and learning more about her from someone who’s _not_ her have resulted in a series of unanswered emails, hung up phone calls, and several “no comments.” 

“That’s not terribly surprising,” she says when I tell her I’m having trouble getting in contact with people. “I burned a lot of bridges. Almost all, I’d say. And everyone else is just gone.” She means gone as in, dead. Her book charts the untimely, premature deaths of colleagues, lovers, friends, and family. An alarming amount. 

“I’ve had to deal with a lot of death,” she admits. Maybe that’s the source of haunting I identified when I first saw her. “Do I feel haunted? In some respects. Not necessarily by _them_ , the people I’ve lost. More by what I didn’t do. What I could have done. You go over and over it in your head. It can make you crazy. Literally, in my case.” 

This is the first time in our conversations she’s directly referred to her bipolar disorder. If the body of her book is the chronicle of decades of dangerous American foreign policy and CIA abuses of power, her struggle with mental illness is the pulsing, beating heart. Formally diagnosed at 22, she is extremely frank about her struggles with the disorder through early and middle adulthood—first to come to terms with the illness, then to hide it from her colleagues, and finally to learn to live with it as a daily reality. 

“It’s not pretty, that’s what I always said. In fact sometimes it’s deeply ugly. Sometimes it’s unbelievably boring. But it’s never just one thing—it’s constantly shifting, and so I have to be constantly vigilant.” 

The perpetually changing nature of her disease has caused her to seek electroconvulsive therapy treatment twice in the last ten years. She describes the treatment as a “brain reset” and one that has saved her life. Her friends and family were not so sure. In her book she writes: 

> _Everyone I knew was terrified. I understood: they were thinking of Sylvia Plath, Jack Nicholson in_ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest _. To them it seemed barbaric, like a form of self-inflicted torture. I didn’t have the words to say that living in my body, in this head that I could not control, was torture. My inability to discern fiction from reality felt apocalyptic. My mind—which I usually felt was my greatest asset—had turned traitor, and I was exhausted. Exhausted from cycling between mania and depression, exhausted from keeping my struggle secret, and exhausted thinking about living like that for a second longer. So I raised a white flag in surrender._

Still, Mathison concedes the incredible insights her illness has offered her. “Sometimes it really did feel like a super power,” she says, eyes wide. “Any therapist will tell you that’s an unhealthy way to look at it, and they’re probably right. I think it was the only way I could come to terms with that twist of fate—or biology, rather.” 

Mathison’s late father, Frank, was also bipolar. “When we were growing up we didn’t have the word ‘bipolar.’ He was ‘manic-depressive,’ which is maybe a better way to describe the disease. He was more prone to depression. But he was also…” She hesitates. “He was the light of our house. The life of the party. He used to say to my sister and me, ‘I love you kids like crazy.’ That was the bar he set.” 

Mathison says her father’s illness led to a somewhat tumultuous upbringing. On the outside, they were a normal family—husband and wife, two kids, and a dog. On the inside, it was chaotic. “We lived by my dad’s illness. He refused to get treatment. When I was younger I really resented him for it, but I understand more now, obviously.” 

She and her older sister Maggie, now a physician with a practice outside Washington, learned to cope with the instability on their own. “Sometimes it was like we were all we had. Our parents fought a lot. We always thought it was about my dad’s illness. So I internalized that, unconsciously. That was a deep source of anxiety for me for many years. It wasn’t until four, five years ago that I learned their fights were less about my dad and more about my mother. Though I’m sure my dad didn’t help,” she adds with a laugh. “I had to unlearn that, that belief that this illness made it somehow impossible for me to be in a relationship with someone else. I had habits and preconceptions, just… my way of life. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” 

Mathison’s decision to put her illness front and center in her narrative has earned both criticism and plaudits from mental health experts and advocates. Several psychiatrists I’ve contacted have echoed the warning Mathison already acknowledges: that to describe a debilitating mental illness as a “super power” is insensitive at best, dangerous at worst. While they concede the attitude is not uncommon among some patients, they also fear the depiction could become a stereotype among a public generally uneducated about the disorder. 

Jefferson Garner, former medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, disagrees. He believes that her honest depiction of living with bipolar disorder will help lessen the stigma in the general public. “That’s no small thing. Regardless of how you feel about her actions or her politics or what have you, she doesn’t let herself be defined by her illness. In fact she seems to have overcome it. I think what she did was very brave.” 

Mathison bristles at this word— _brave_ —many times throughout our conversations and resists the label. “Writing this book doesn’t feel brave to me. It feels necessary.” She adds quickly, “Sorry, I don’t mean to get on my pulpit.” 

What of her past experiences, then? Preventing a global conflict, protecting a President-elect, or uncovering an American terror cell? “I never saw it like that. ‘Brave’? It was my job. It didn’t register in that way.” 

I ask if there are other people she thinks deserve the label more than her, maybe the people she’s written about who lost their lives in the line of duty. “I think if they were here sitting across from you, they’d say the same thing. You just said it yourself: _duty_. You have to understand the way the Agency normalizes this kind of sacrifice. The sacrifice of a family, partners, friends, time. In the most extreme circumstances, you sacrifice your life. And what they offer in return is a fucking star on a wall. There is something deeply wrong with that.” 

Throughout the book, Mathison disassembles the public’s understanding of several prominent figures and highlights others we had no idea existed. A significant portion of her book is dedicated to essentially rewriting the story of Nicholas Brody, the American Marine prisoner of war who returned home in late 2011 as a hero and just over a year later was implicated in the 12/12 bombing of the CIA headquarters.

Of all the revelations in her book, her claim that Brody was in fact innocent of that bombing and that CIA brass knew it is one of the most shocking. After Brody died in 2013 on a covert mission, she lobbied Andrew Lockhart, then CIA Director, for one of those stars on the Memorial Wall, the private memorial—one star for every CIA employee who lost their life—that greets everyone as they walk through the lobby of the Agency’s headquarters. 

“He basically told me that despite whatever Brody had done at the end, his earlier actions disqualified him. That wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. That he would always be the person who put on a suicide vest. The person who made that tape. It was completely lost on him that he was putting 219 stars on the Wall for people who’d died at a memorial for a man who dropped a bomb on a school full of children. That person was deserving of a star, but Brody wasn’t?” Once denied, she didn’t push it. “I was hyper aware of how this appeared to everyone, of course. I wasn’t completely oblivious.” 

She’s referring now to another major revelation in her book: her years-long affair with Brody, which started a few weeks after he returned from captivity and lasted until his death. 

I’ll admit that I was a bit gobsmacked when I got to that part of the book. The woman whose job was hunting terrorists ends up falling for one? It’s the stuff of tabloids and soap operas. Yet it lends a propulsive, page-turning quality to the book that has kept it at the top of the _New York Times_ Best Seller List for months. (One American journalist who has covered the intelligence community for years tells me their relationship was an open secret at Langley, but to the general public, it was certainly news.) 

It also gives easy fire to her critics, who have predictably used the relationship to discredit her. It is this indiscretion more than any other (and there are others: her use of illegal surveillance to gather intelligence on Brody and his family; providing authorization to bomb a Pakistani wedding party; or setting a honey trap for the nephew of former Taliban leader Haissam Haqqani… to name a few) that her detractors have latched onto more than any other. Mathison is mostly unbothered by these critiques.

“I couldn’t tell my story without telling Brody’s story, because I shaped it, knowingly and willingly. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, and I didn’t want to be dishonest in this book,” she says matter-of-factly. 

I point out that her attempt to rehab his image necessarily hurts her own and she smiles and says again, “Yes, isn’t that interesting?” At the same time, it’s a stroke of genius: if you accept that she’s not lying about this, because who on earth would, you have to accept that she’s not lying about any of the rest of it. The illicit romance also serves as a Trojan horse, luring unassuming readers in by you-just-have-to-read-it-for-yourself word-of-mouth, so that she can deliver her more substantive, policy-driven message. In a book all about sacrifices, it’s her final one. 

. . . . 

Shortly after the publication of _Tyranny of Secrets,_ when it seemed you couldn’t escape a mention of Mathison or her book wherever you went, I catch her for a quick phone call. On the phone, she explains she’s just recorded an interview with the _New York Times_ for their podcast _The Daily_. 

While the media have taken a keen interest in Mathison’s story, the same cannot be said for anyone in her former life. She has not heard from her sister or other family members, any of her former CIA colleagues, or her mentor Saul Berenson. 

“And I don’t expect I will,” she says. “I don’t think my lawyers want me talking to any of them either,” she adds with a laugh. 

She says then, more seriously, “I have never judged anyone for the worst thing they’ve ever done. I don’t mean this in a ‘Oh look how saintly I am’ way. It’s just what I believe. I’ve always believed that each of us, we’re more than the worst things we’ve done, we’re more than our worst moments. People can’t understand how I could have loved Brody, after what he’d done, especially to me. Or Yevgeny [Gromov, an officer in the Russian GRU and her boyfriend of over two years]. But we all do terrible shit to each other.” 

It’s an interesting, if cynical, worldview for Mathison, one that allows her in some ways to absolve herself of her sins. 

“It’s not a free license to just do terrible shit all the time,” she continues. “I actually think it’s sort of radically hopeful. You don’t have to be defined by the worst thing you’ve ever done. You can still be worthy.” 

Worthy of what, I ask. “Success, love, happiness.” 

The question of worthiness permeates her book, and at times she seems to be having a debate with herself on the limits of grace and forgiveness. It is no more prevalent than in her relationship with Berenson, who at various points was her boss at the CIA, her most trusted friend, and a replacement father figure. It was his asset whose name Mathison revealed to the Russian government to secure the evidence to evade war with Pakistan. And though Mathison writes that she dislikes the subtitle of the book, “Why I Betrayed My Country,” to describe her actions, I do wonder if she feels like she betrayed _him_. 

She is silent for a long time. The faint noise in the background gradually quiets and I hear the sound of a door closing. 

“It’s so difficult to separate the personal relationships from the rest of it,” she finally says. “People would say things like, ‘It wasn’t personal, it’s just business.’ But our work _was_ personal. Always. It was human, it was real, it was intimate.” 

She continues, “Saul taught me, he raised me. To do whatever it takes. And to be like him. What I did is not something Saul would ever do, if it was his asset or mine or anyone else’s. At the same time, I felt it was necessary. So where does that leave us?” 

Needless to say, outing his asset was the unequivocal end to the relationship that Mathison calls one of the most defining in her life. In the book, she shifts from reverent to deeply critical to pitying and back around again as she describes the ups and downs of their decades-long friendship. During our conversations it’s more of the same. Even with distance and perspective, she seems unable to decide exactly how she feels about him. To be fair, at times while reading I found his actions to be that of both friend and foe. 

“Whoever said that you hurt the ones you love the most was exactly right. Because we loved each other and we hurt each other a lot,” she says. 

I ask if she thinks their relationship was toxic or codependent. She takes another uncharacteristically lengthy pause. 

“Not until you just said it,” she says. “Maybe it was. But it’s over now.” 

She says she has not spoken to or heard from him since an explosive fight they had in his house the day before she gave up the asset’s name. In her book this scene plays out with the requisite passion needed to convey just how steadfast they were in their staunchly opposing viewpoints.

“The word that springs to mind when thinking about that night is disbelief. I was in disbelief that he was unwilling to tell me the asset’s name, knowing that nuclear war was literally hanging in the balance. I was in disbelief that it had come to this. By that point I’d already decided I’d do whatever it took to find the asset. And I did. I did whatever it took, including destroying that relationship.” 

I have tried repeatedly to get in contact with Berenson for this story. Each time I am met with radio silence. Shortly after Mathison defected to Moscow in 2018, Berenson resigned as National Security Advisor to then-president Benjamin Hayes. A close friend of his tells me that since his resignation he has become increasingly withdrawn, in some cases not leaving his house for weeks on end. In 2019, he suffered a massive heart attack and spent weeks in hospital recovering.

A man of his stature and experience would typically be taking a victory lap in retirement, giving lectures to packed crowds, writing op-eds for the _Washington Post_ , or, like his former protégé, writing a memoir about his extraordinary life. 

Instead, he seems to have disappeared from public life entirely. His friend tells me he doesn’t know how to be retired. I suspect the truth is that he doesn’t know how to be without _her_ , in a permanent state of mourning and disbelief. 

. . . . 

A few weeks after Mathison’s book was published, a new term entered the zeitgeist to describe the experience of a heretofore silent, ignored group of women: “unenthusiastic motherhood.”

Mathison uses the phrase in her book to describe her relationship to being a mother:

> _I was an unenthusiastic mother. I loved—I love—my child more deeply and fully than I thought it was possible to love another person. At the same time, I did not love being a mother. I wrestled with these two halves of myself: the part that loves my daughter, that would die for her, and the part that knows if she didn’t exist, my life would be so much easier, so much cleaner._

Her daughter Franny is now six and a half years old and lives in suburban DC with Mathison’s sister and her family. She has not seen her since 2017, when she departed for Russia on a covert mission to exfiltrate Simone Martin, a French national who was involved in a Russian plot to discredit and ultimately oust former president Elizabeth Keane. What was meant to be a temporary separation for a short business trip to Moscow has now become devastatingly permanent. 

Mathison’s blunt, painfully honest description of her struggle to grow into motherhood has sparked a flurry of decidedly feminist conversation about the shame and guilt many women carry as they take on this new, monumental role. Essays with titles like “Mathison and Me: On Being a Bad Mom” and “What We Can Learn from Unenthusiastic Mothers” were published all summer. A Twitter hashtag was born. 

Mathison says she followed the conversation from a distance. “In the beginning it made me feel less alone,” she says. “On the other hand, I _knew_ that I couldn’t be alone in this. So then I just felt angry. I don’t follow it as much now.” 

As someone without much background knowledge about the CIA or global intelligence, I found myself engrossed in Mathison’s description of her evolving relationship with both her child and motherhood. In our interviews, she is understandably reticent on the topic. Though her book seems to have opened the door on this dialogue, the reality is that it’s still taboo for most. 

“People have difficulty with nuance. How could you love your child but not love being her mother? I still lie awake at night and wonder the same thing.” Contributing to those restless nights is the bleak reality that she’ll never see her again. 

“The moment I realized that if I gave up the asset it would mean I could never see Franny again… it was honestly the worst moment of my life. Worse than having to leave her a year before, or watching the man I loved die. Because I knew I was going to give up the asset. I _knew_ I would never see her again. It wasn’t a hypothetical, it was a certainty. I vomited. I had a panic attack. I remember I tried to think about what her hand felt like when I held it in mine. Then I entered a sort of… dissociated state. I shut it all off. It was the only way I could go through with it.” 

She says it wasn’t until she arrived in Moscow a few days later, finally safe, that she exited that state. “So, I could exhale. But actually it was like I couldn’t breathe. The grief was so overwhelming.” 

The shame and guilt she felt for not being a good enough mother when she was with Franny has shifted now to shame and guilt for her decision to be without her.

“It’s been two and a half years now. It gets a little easier each day. When I left, a hole opened up inside me and every day that goes by it’s like I paper over it, little by little. Then, I don’t know... I’ll see a father chase his kid at the park or I’ll see someone play the violin on TV and I feel it all over again. It's so sudden. The hole opens right back up.” 

. . . .

For our final interview, I ask Mathison if I can see the space where she wrote her book. She’s mentioned exhausting late nights writing in her office a few times. “I think it will really help paint a picture for the reader. It can really be quite illuminating,” I write in an email. I go on to explain that it’s something I do with all artists I write about. And while some authors are lured in by that label, Mathison is not one of them: she writes back that she’s not an artist. 

I sense I’m not getting anywhere with this method of persuasion, so I tell her that while the conversations we’ve had have all been great, my editors want more. After a few days of silence, she finally acquiesces and I arrange one more trip to Moscow. 

I arrive at the address she’s texted me mid-morning. Situated in the exclusive Ostozhenka neighborhood along Moscow’s famous Golden Mile, the building is walking distance to the Kremlin and directly adjacent to the Moskva River. A wide swath of the country’s elite, from film stars to oligarchs, call this neighborhood home. It is late autumn when I visit and the neighborhood’s riverside views are stunning. I notice a portion of the street blocked off for what I later learn is a photoshoot for Russian _Vogue_ , and I spot a handful of lanky models sporting this season’s most coveted outerwear. This is the new Moscow, a far cry from the grey city blocks that spring to most Westerners’ minds when they think of the former Soviet capital.

The doorman who greets me when I walk into the building asks for a photo ID and calls up to the apartment just to confirm that I am who I say I am. I ask if this is regular procedure for visitors but he doesn’t respond. He escorts me to an elevator and presses the button for the penthouse. I am beginning to wonder if there is a reason I haven’t been invited here before.

Mathison shares the apartment with her boyfriend, Yevgeny Gromov, who is a colonel in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm. It’s a vast space, sparsely decorated, modern and industrial, with massive floor-to-ceiling windows that offer views of the river and Moscow’s Seven Sisters. When I’m there, there is a stack of boxes in the kitchen and Mathison explains they’re in the process of moving and apologizes for the mess.

Gromov is a late-emerging character in her story and an elusive one at that: the book is noticeably short on details about their evolving relationship. They met in person over three years ago in Moscow, but by that point Mathison says they’d been “circling each other” for months. It was on that trip, the same one that resulted in Simone Martin’s exfiltration, that Mathison ended up being imprisoned for seven months in retaliation. Their unlikely relationship, which Mathison insists did not become romantic until after she’d been living in Russia for months, solidifies their enemies-to-friends trajectory. Indeed, Gromov was a key ally in securing the evidence Mathison claims halted escalating tensions between America and Pakistan in 2018. 

Together, they’ve had to navigate uncharted waters following the publication of her book, which has thrust Mathison, and Gromov by association, into the spotlight. They’re not being followed by paparazzi but their lives have become public in new, unsettling ways. 

“Something small and probably silly I’ve noticed is that if we attend some public function or benefit—and we’re invited to more of them now, too—where there’s a photographer, we _will_ be photographed. We never were before. That’s different. Then, you know, there’s also the death threats, emails from crazy people, doxxing, shit like that. Most of which I try really hard to ignore. We both knew going into this that it was a risk. It was one of my biggest anxieties: the loss of anonymity which in itself is a loss of normalcy. We decided together that it was worth the risk, and I’m very grateful that he has been so supportive because the experience has been a little destabilizing.”

I ask if the loss of privacy was a factor in their decision to move. The openness of the apartment, not to mention the huge windows, gives the feeling of being on display. 

“Well, at the end of the day the space is just too big for two people. That’s a big reason. And he’s gone a lot for work so it can be lonely in this big house by yourself. I also want some place with a garden, somewhere my hands can touch soil,” she says. “But yes, that was a factor. I always say privacy is like clean air. You don’t even notice that you have it until you _don’t_ have it and when you walk outside you feel like you’re suffocating.” She pauses and says with a laugh, “I can hear a hundred op-eds being written right now calling me out for how hypocritical that is.” 

Mathison displays this type of self-awareness several times during our conversations. I get the feeling she’s already thought through every permutation of her critics’ arguments before they even have a chance to voice them. If this was a game, she’d be playing offense and defense simultaneously. 

She’s not wrong about the critics though. When her book was first published, a slew of editorials from thinkers and policy makers on both sides of the American political aisle took aim at her. I read aloud a passage to her from one that went viral in the _Wall Street Journal_ , penned by Senator Richard Eames: 

> _Mathison’s hypocrisy is stunning in its breadth and downright offensive in its depth. She claims she gave up the name of an American asset, knowing her certain death, to keep Americans safe. At the same time, she divulges an abundance of classified intelligence that does just the opposite: weakens our position at home and abroad and jeopardizes active operations across all sectors of the American intelligence apparatus. In short, she makes all your lives_ less _safe. As you read this, she sits cozily in a luxury penthouse in Moscow paid for in part by the financial spoils of active measures designed to weaken and hurt America, of which her Russian boyfriend was a chief architect. She’s figuratively and literally in bed with the Russians, and Putin is smiling ear-to-ear._

I pause for dramatic effect and she laughs. “Oh, sorry, was that the end? I thought there might be more.” (There is, but I choose not to continue.)

I ask for her reaction and she says, “I think what’s really striking about that is he doesn’t disagree with what I’ve said, just the fact of me saying it. I’m not sorry for what I did. I don’t regret it. And I’m glad we’re having these conversations out in the open now, instead of behind closed doors.” 

She adds with a wry smile, “And for the record, I’ve never met Putin.”

. . . . 

At this point I must reveal that my earlier reasoning for securing a visit to Mathison’s home was something of a ruse. In fact, my editors were very pleased with what I’d shared with them so far and were eager to publish. Still, I couldn’t fight the feeling that Mathison was withholding something, that every answer she gave had one additional thread she was consciously (or unconsciously) preventing herself from sharing. Truthfully, I may have been projecting. What better thing to spice up a story about a former spy than some last-minute intel that cracks the whole thing wide open? 

I still had questions about some of the book’s more significant loose ends, including her relationships with Gromov and Franny. My earlier attempts to get her to elaborate on these admittedly sensitive topics hadn’t been fruitful. I hoped that if we met in person, in her home, one last time, she might be more inclined to open up in the ways I felt the story required. 

So when I arrive at her apartment that autumn day and see boxes everywhere, I have a momentary internal panic attack. Maybe she’s called my bluff. But I don’t give up the game just yet. After an appropriate amount of time I finally ask to see her office. 

She leads me into a comparatively small room off the kitchen. One window, one door. I am surprised to find that nothing is packed up. In fact, the room is bursting. 

Almost every square inch of wall space is covered in paper: dozens upon dozens of news articles and the occasional image of major characters in her book (looking at the wall is like playing a game of I Spy). On the center of one wall, there is a giant, focus-pulling poster of a black cloaked figure with the headline LEGACY OF TORTURE, from a conference she attended in Moscow in 2019. Combined, it makes for an overwhelming collage. Mathison says it served as inspiration during the harder periods of writing. 

“I’ve always been a visual thinker. At the same time, it’s tactile. I need to touch it. I need to put it up in front of me and look at it everyday. Then, suddenly, I’ll have an idea. ‘I should tie this back together with that other thing.’ What it really does is remind me. It was a reminder: daily, constant.” 

Scattered across the rest of the office are stacks of paper and books she used for research. More of the same. I sense there is some organized chaos—emphasis on chaos—at play and she laughs and says this is actually very organized for her. “Honestly the fact that someone can come into this room and more or less figure out what’s going on is a major improvement.” 

On one of the window panes she’s placed rows and rows of sticky notes, each the title of a chapter in her book. “Weirdly, I wrote a lot of the book out of order, even though it’s told chronologically. Some things were easier to access, I guess. And some stuff I clearly didn’t want to return to or didn’t know how to write. So the sticky notes helped me with that. Every time I finished a chapter I put the sticky note up on the window. And slowly, I filled in the gaps.” 

The titles of each chapter are one of the more peculiar parts of her book. Figuring out how they matched up with the chapter’s content actually became something of a game for me. In my more desperate moments I read through Reddit threads that offered wild theories.

Some are more obvious, like “Beirut Is Back,” which chronicles her re-entry into the CIA in 2012—a journey that began in, you guessed it, Beirut. Others are complete mysteries. What exactly does “Halfway to a Donut” mean (Reddit was devoid of theories for this one)? 

Or “A False Glimmer,” which concludes with the foiled sarin gas attack at the Hauptbahnhof train station in Berlin in 2016. Surely the “glimmer” can’t refer to the attack?

Mathison shrugs off the question. “They’re just titles, they don’t really mean anything.” 

Again, I sense she’s withholding, so I press her. 

“If they don’t mean anything why name the chapter at all?” I ask. 

She is quiet for a moment and looks back at the window. 

“One of the things that I’ve realized since the book has come out into the world is that people tend to take real ownership over the story and the events that took place. On some level, that’s unavoidable and expected even. I _wrote_ the goddamn book, right? But at the end of the day, it’s still _my_ story. I don’t know, you’re probably gonna say I want to have my cake and eat it too.” 

“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” I reply. 

She nods. “Yeah, well… some of the titles… they’re just for me.” 

For Mathison, the hardest part about writing the book was venturing to parts of her life that she’d purposefully cordoned off to protect herself or others. 

“I think of it like a shoebox,” she says. “The same way you’d see in movies how people would save little trinkets or memories from their high school sweethearts or summer camps or whatever. Things that should remind them. That’s what I did, only mentally and emotionally. So I have a CIA box. I took all that baggage—all the emotional souvenirs, the memories, the unpleasant feelings—put it into a box and shoved it way back in the closet so I didn’t have to think about it. It’s a sort of self-preservation tactic I guess. I couldn’t function otherwise, I couldn’t live in this world.” 

Is there a Brody box then? Or a Franny box? 

“Yes, I think so. And I’m not really proud of that, but it’s what I had to do. It was too painful. It was the only way I could process that grief. I don’t think of it as repression or denial. Having a space for them made me feel safer. And it’s allowed me to… live with myself. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish it could have been different.”

At this point her eyes begin to well up with tears. For my part, I’m beginning to feel claustrophobic, surrounded by layers upon layers of trauma, none of which even happened to me. Then I spot a small framed photo on her desk of a little girl in a yellow raincoat petting a dog and beaming at the camera. I realize the smiling child must be Franny. I don’t ask about the photo or its origins and instead suggest we go back to the living room. She receives a phone call then and excuses herself to answer it, leaving me alone. I start to wander. 

Though the apartment is light on decorative touches, I begin to notice more and more signs of Mathison and Gromov’s shared life. A framed photo on an end table of the two of them at what I later learn is Gromov’s dacha a few hours north of Moscow. His and hers iPads on the kitchen table. The start of a grocery list pinned next to the refrigerator, in mixed handwriting: _bread, almond milk, bananas, toothpaste._

There is a large open study off the living room, its contents mostly in boxes. In one I find a diverse movie collection: _Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Star Wars, Amour, Battleship Potemkin_. In another, stacks of books from what I’m assuming is a shared collection: classics by Dostoyevsky and Austen, as well as a vast collection of memoirs from the likes of Mary Karr, Elie Wiesel, Azar Nafisi, and, of course, Edward Snowden. I have been pondering their dual trajectories, the ways in which they overlap and otherwise diverge. 

When Mathison returns a few minutes later she confirms that they actually have met, at the same conference where she procured the LEGACY OF TORTURE poster now hanging in her office. 

“It was an interesting experience meeting him. A little surreal, actually. But we took very different paths to get here. I think he has a very strict moral compass, and a strong sense of clarity about that. Not to say that I don’t. But I found him a little rigid. I could sense that he questioned my authority to speak on these topics given my level of culpability in the current state.” 

She’s right, of course. Snowden and Mathison are both Americans living in Russia in exile as a result of defying powerful forces in American intelligence. They are at turns identified as patriots and traitors. But most of the similarities end there. 

Whereas Snowden quickly adopted a low profile after gaining temporary asylum in 2013, famously walking the streets of Moscow in disguise, Mathison has shown no such intentions. His livelihood depends on speaking fees and publishing advances, and much of his income can be and is seized by the American government. She, however, living a life of comparative luxury, seems unbothered by finances. The key difference here is, of course, Gromov. 

Having a boyfriend with connections at the Kremlin certainly doesn’t hurt, and while it’s unreported how much the advance or sales on her book have earned her, I wager a guess that it’s nowhere near enough to afford a penthouse in the country’s capital and a baronial dacha for holidays. 

Mathison is unimpressed by this line of questioning. She says, “I know what you’re suggesting and it’s incorrect. Our relationship is, for one thing, private. People are free to believe whatever they want about why we’re together, but at the end of the day, we both know the truth and that’s good enough.” She adds one more time that they didn’t become romantically involved until after her long-stay residency was approved. 

Otto Düring, the billionaire philanthropist, is one of the few people I reach out to about Mathison who does get back to me. She worked for him for a period of about two years between 2014 and 2016, as the head of security at his global foundation. In her book, Mathison describes Düring as “both idealistic and cynical” and writes, “What bonded us was our clear-eyed view of the way the world actually was, and our intentions to make it better.” 

Düring says that while Mathison never struck him as someone overly concerned with money, she is also not a martyr. “She’s not afraid to ask for what she needs. Or what she wants. And I’ve always loved that about her. The most extraordinary, the most gifted, the best among us—they don’t toil in private wondering, _how does this look_ , _what will they think?_ That has never been Carrie.”

When Mathison left the Düring Foundation in 2016, she moved to New York and set up a legal aid foundation for Muslims in the United States. The foundation ceased operations in 2017 but its still-accessible website lists Düring as a significant benefactor. I ask him if he ever felt like she was using him for his money. 

He says, “Well, first of all, she was my employee. I paid her to do a job, and she did it very well. I would have gladly paid her more to stay on with me at the Foundation, and she knew that, but she needed to go back to America to be with Franny. I contribute to many different projects that I find worthy and that align with our work at the Foundation.” 

He pauses for a moment and then continues, “Carrie is not a natural ‘do-gooder’ type. She had to go down a few different paths before she found the right one. She meandered along the way. First in Berlin, at my Foundation. Then her work in New York. Now this. I see it all as a natural evolution and I think if you asked her she’d say the same. But for her there is friction with it, with that work. I recall once, we were at my house in the countryside. I can’t remember if this is in the book or not. I said to her that some people, most people, are earthbound. And some people are born with wings. Carrie and me, we are not earthbound people. I think that’s why so many years later we are still friends. Carrie has wings. I am very happy for her that she’s found a way to fly.” 

. . . . 

The first words I ever read from Mathison are in the book’s dedication on its opening pages: 

> _For my daughter, in the hope that one day she will understand._

During my first interview with Mathison, one month before the book's publication, I ask her about the dedication. What, exactly, does she want her daughter to understand? 

“I want her to understand who her mother is. That’s not something I ever got from my mother.” 

“Your mother who left when you were eighteen?” 

“Yes.” 

“Do you think you were successful?” 

“Like it says, I hope.” 

She smiles uncomfortably and I move on. 

In our final meeting, I return to the topic again. It’s been five months since the book has been published, and a lot has changed. I wonder if her perspective might have. 

“I still have hope,” she says. “Hope that someday, maybe in the distant future, she will. How will I know? I might not ever. I have to live with that.” 

“And she has to live without her mother,” I say. 

Her eyes narrow ever so slightly at me. 

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. A _lot_. She’s… she’s okay. She’ll be okay. She’s with Maggie. Maggie can offer her things I can’t. Were we happy? Yes, sometimes, we were happy. Sometimes it was easy and light and perfect. But those happy moments, they’re not enough. For her or for me.”

A long, uncomfortable silence extends between us and then, abruptly, she asks me, “What do you think?” 

“It doesn’t really matter what I think,” I say. 

“Well, you’re going to write about it one way or the other,” she counters, and she’s completely right. 

“I think it’s all incredibly sad,” I say.

“Yes. It is.” 

Later I think about the framed photo of Franny in her office, a little girl permanently frozen in time. In a room full of phantoms, the most haunting. I imagine Mathison in the room late at night, eyes aglow from her computer monitor and the backdrop of city lights. I picture her writing with perfect, sincere clarity about running across buildings from gunmen, putting strangers’ lives ahead of her own, sacrificing her body and mind and sanity for people who will never even know her name. I think of her daughter in ten or fifteen or twenty or thirty years reading those same pages, no longer a little girl in a yellow raincoat, the opposite of a ghost, and wondering to herself, _but why didn’t you fight for_ me _?_

. . . . 

As our last afternoon together draws to a close, I inevitably shift the conversation to what’s next. She reveals she’s working on the outline for a new book but won’t share what its subject will be. “That type of planning is challenging for me,” she says. “It’s not something I had to do with my other book—I just started writing and didn’t stop until I was finished. I knew it all already. It _happened_ to me. It was my life.” 

“And we have the move of course. I’m looking forward to the change in scenery,” she says. “Winters here are hard for me. Christmas, especially.” She says she has bad associations with the holiday from her time in the Russian prison in 2017. 

“It’s been two and a half years now. In some respects it feels so much longer, and in others, like almost no time has passed. But, most of that time was spent writing the book, or, now, promoting it. I was so focused on finishing, on the next thing. It’s not my nature, to go slow. I don’t think it ever will be.” 

Perhaps, then, she’ll spend the next few months easing up on the gas. “Perhaps,” she says. “Living like that, it’s exhausting. To feel like if you ever slow down, they’ll catch you. But going slow, being intentional, that requires a different kind of discipline. It’s one I’m learning now.” 

I gather my things and tell her that some fact-checkers from the magazine may be in touch. Outside, it has started to rain, and she digs in the back of the coat closet for an umbrella for me. 

“Perfect running weather,” she says as she walks me to the door. 

At first I think she’s being sarcastic but she says she fully intends to head out after me. I say something about not understanding the people in London out for a jog in the pouring rain, their shoes soaked and hair dripping. 

“I actually really dislike running in the rain,” she continues. “Hate it. But I’ll always go for a run when it’s raining, in the hope that while I’m out there, it’ll stop. Very, very rarely does this ever happen. But I still go out. Because I love when it does. There’s a breeze, it’s slightly cooler, no one’s around. The air is different, lighter and heavier at the same time. For the briefest of moments, before I notice what’s happened, it gets very quiet and still and peaceful.” 

Her eyes light up and she flashes a knowing smile. 

“I’m always chasing that moment.” 

**Author's Note:**

> This was the original tenth and final chapter of Cathedrals that I decided to post by itself on the advice of @ascloseasthis. 
> 
> "Varieties of Disturbance" is the name of a 2013 _New Yorker_ profile of Claire Danes and many of the quotes from Carrie are barely altered versions of things Claire and other television and culture critics have said about Carrie over the years. 
> 
> I had so much fun channeling all my Homeland nerdiness into this "article" and it was immensely cathartic to write. Thank you for reading!
> 
> (Alt title: I Spy)


End file.
